Study guide
The Lay of Igor's Campaign
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Overview
- Original title
- Slovo o polku Igoreve, 'The Word (or Tale) of Igor's Campaign'; translated as The Lay, The Song or The Tale of the Armament of Igor
- Language
- Old East Slavic (Old Russian) with Church Slavonic elements; the text has no exact parallel in surviving medieval writing
- Subject
- The failed raid of Prince Igor Svyatoslavich of Novgorod-Seversk against the Polovtsians (Cumans) in April–May 1185, his defeat on the river Kayala, captivity and escape
- Composed
- Usually dated between 1185 and about 1200, since princes addressed as living were dead by the early thirteenth century; a minority of scholars have argued for a modern forgery
- Manuscript
- One copy, probably of the fifteenth or sixteenth century, acquired by Count Aleksei Musin-Pushkin in the early 1790s; published in Moscow in 1800 and burned in the fire of 1812
- Surviving witnesses
- The first edition of 1800 and a manuscript copy made for Catherine the Great in the 1790s (published in 1864), with notes of the first editors
- Form
- Rhythmic prose or unrhymed verse of irregular length, rich in repetition, refrain, apostrophe and nature imagery; its division into lines is an editor's decision
- Authorship
- Anonymous; the poet speaks to 'brothers', names the older bard Boyan as a model and was probably close to the princely courts of southern Rus
- Quoted translation
- Leonard A. Magnus, The Tale of the Armament of Igor (Oxford University Press, 1915), English prose in three parts with Magnus's section headings
- Afterlife
- A founding text of Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian literature; source of Borodin's opera Prince Igor (1890); translated into English by Vladimir Nabokov (1960)
Context
The Lay of Igor's Campaign tells of a real and rather minor military disaster. In April 1185 Igor Svyatoslavich, prince of Novgorod-Seversk, a small principality on the Desna in the south-east of Kievan Rus, rode out into the steppe against the Polovtsians, the Turkic nomads also known as Cumans or Kipchaks. With him went his brother Vsevolod, his young son Vladimir and his nephew Svyatoslav Olgovich. On 1 May 1185 the army saw an eclipse of the sun, an event recorded by astronomers and chroniclers alike. After a first easy victory the Russian force was surrounded by the gathered armies of the khans Konchak and Gzak, and in a battle lasting into a third day it was destroyed near the river Kayala. Igor and the other princes were taken captive. After some months in captivity (the chronicles place his escape in 1185 or 1186) Igor escaped with the help of a Polovtsian named Ovlur; his son returned later, having married Konchak's daughter. The campaign is described in detail in the Kievan (Hypatian) Chronicle and more briefly in the Laurentian Chronicle, which let modern readers measure the poem against an independent prose account (Franklin 1996) (Zenkovsky 1974).
The poem was written within a few years of these events, in a Rus divided among many princes of the house of Riurik. Kiev was still the senior throne but no longer controlled the others, and the princely clans, above all Igor's own branch, the Olgovichi of Chernigov, and the Monomashichi descended from Vladimir Monomakh, fought each other and sometimes hired Polovtsian allies against their kinsmen. The Lay turns Igor's private raid into a lesson for this whole world. It recalls the feuds of the eleventh century, laments the suffering of the land and appeals by name to the great princes of the day to take up arms 'for the Russian land'. That phrase, repeated like a refrain, is the poem's real subject (Fennell 1974) (Franklin 1996) (Vernadsky 1948) (Obolensky 1971).
The text survives only through an extraordinary chain of chance. In the early 1790s Count Aleksei Musin-Pushkin, a collector of antiquities, obtained a miscellany containing the Slovo, apparently from the former Spaso-Yaroslavsky monastery in Yaroslavl. A copy was made for Catherine the Great, and in 1800 Musin-Pushkin and his collaborators published the first edition in Moscow. In September 1812, during Napoleon's occupation, Musin-Pushkin's house burned with his library, and the manuscript was lost. Catherine's copy was rediscovered and published in 1864. Because no medieval manuscript survives, and because the first editors made errors in dividing and reading words, every modern edition is an act of reconstruction (Likhachev 1978) (Zenkovsky 1974).
The loss of the manuscript opened the way to doubt. From the 1810s sceptics suggested that the Lay was a forgery in the age of Ossian, and in the twentieth century the French Slavist André Mazon and the Soviet historian Aleksandr Zimin argued that it was an imitation of the Zadonshchina, a fifteenth-century tale of the battle of Kulikovo. Their opponents, led by Roman Jakobson, and later the linguist Andrei Zaliznyak, defended the poem as a work of the late twelfth century. Most specialists now accept its antiquity, largely because its grammar matches features of Old Russian that were unknown to scholars in the 1790s (Mazon 1940) (Grégoire 1948) (Zaliznyak 2004).
Magnus's translation, quoted in this guide, appeared in 1915 with the Russian text and a long commentary. He printed the work as English prose, divided it into three parts and many numbered sections with headings of his own, and placed his own explanatory additions in square brackets. His version is literal and sometimes awkward, but it keeps the strangeness of the original images, the pagan names and the repetitions that a smoother version would lose. Readers who want a version laid out in lines can turn to Nabokov's annotated translation of 1960 or to Zenkovsky's anthology (Magnus 1915) (Nabokov 1960) (Zenkovsky 1974).
Plot overview
The poet begins by asking how to tell his story: in the old manner of Boyan, a famous bard who flew in thought through the trees and sang the glory of past princes, or in the plain manner of the present day. He chooses to tell it 'from the elder Vladimir up to your contemporary Igor'. Igor sees the sun darkened over his army, ignores the omen and resolves to 'drink of the Don' in his helmet. His brother Vsevolod joins him with the warriors of Kursk, and the army rides into the steppe while birds and beasts cry warnings and the demon Div calls from a tree-top.
On a Friday the Russians rout a Polovtsian force and seize maidens, gold and rich cloth. But the next day the khans Gzak and Konchak gather their armies, the winds 'scions of Stribog' drive arrows on the Russians, and the battle continues for two more days. Vsevolod fights like a bull; the poet breaks off to recall the ruinous feuds of Igor's grandfather Oleg. On the third day Igor's standards fall by the Kayala, the Russians finish the 'feast' of blood, and the grass and trees bow down in grief.
The second part turns to the consequences. Discord personified as a Maiden splashes her swan-wings on the Don; the Polovtsians raid Rus and the women lament. In Kiev the Grand Prince Svyatoslav dreams of black shrouds and spilled pearls, and his boyars tell him that Igor and Vsevolod have been taken. Svyatoslav speaks his 'golden word', blaming his kinsmen's rash pursuit of glory. The poet then appeals in turn to the great princes of Rus, from Suzdal to Galicia, to avenge 'the wounds of Igor', reproaches the descendants of Vseslav of Polotsk for their feuds and recalls the werewolf-like career of Vseslav himself.
On the walls of Putivl Igor's wife Yaroslavna laments at dawn, calling on the Wind, the river Dnieper and the Sun to spare and return her husband. In the third part God shows Igor the road home. Summoned by Ovlur, he flees like an ermine, a duck, a wolf and a falcon, talks with the river Donets and escapes the pursuing khans, who debate whether to kill his son or bind him with a Polovtsian bride. Igor arrives in Kiev and rides to the church of the Mother of God, and the poem ends in a song of glory to the princes and their retinue.
Part by part
Part 1: The Proem and Boyan
Part I · I–II (Proem; The Narrative)
Summary
The poet addresses his listeners as 'brothers' and asks a question about method. Should the tale of Igor's campaign be told in the 'ancient diction', or in the manner of the songs of the present time rather than in the elaborate style of Boyan? Boyan, he explains, was a singer of an earlier age who in his thought ran like a wolf, flew like an eagle and leapt through the trees, and who sang of the princes of the eleventh century, among them Yaroslav the Wise and Mstislav the Brave.
Boyan's art is described in a double image. He seemed to release ten falcons on a flock of swans, so that whichever swan was struck sang a song to a prince; but in truth he laid his fingers on the strings, and the strings themselves sounded the praise. The poet then announces the span of his own tale, from the 'elder Vladimir' to Igor, who sharpened his heart with courage and led his army into the Polovtsian land 'for the sake of the land of the Russians'.
Analysis
The opening is one of the great problems of the poem. The question 'Were it not seemly...?' can be read as a real proposal to imitate the old style or as a rhetorical question that rejects it, and the following lines can be taken as admiration or as gentle criticism of Boyan's fanciful flights. Whatever the answer, the poet places himself self-consciously in a tradition of court song, names a predecessor and sets out to combine the 'two halves' of time, the glorious past and the troubled present. No other early Rus text describes a secular poet in this way, and Boyan is otherwise unknown (Likhachev 1978) (Fennell 1974).
The falcon-and-swan image already contains the poem's method. Things in the natural world stand for human actions, and the boundary between them is fluid: falcons become fingers, swans become songs. The phrase 'from the elder Vladimir up to your contemporary Igor' sets Igor's adventure against two centuries of dynastic history, which the poem will revisit in its digressions. And the closing words 'for the sake of the land of the Russians' introduce the idea that will give the defeat its meaning.
For the wise Boyan when he wished to make a song for any man, in his thought used to fly in the trees, [race] like a grey wolf on earth, [soar] like a dusky eagle beneath the clouds.
Boyan's art is pictured as shape-shifting flight through the three realms of tree, earth and sky. The bracketed verbs are Magnus's additions.
laid his own wizard fingers on the living strings, which then themselves throbbed out praise for the princes.
The metaphor of falcons is explained: the singer plays a stringed instrument, probably the gusli, and the praise seems to come from the strings themselves.
Let us begin, my brothers, this tale from the elder Vladimir up to your contemporary Igor
The poet's chosen frame: a history running from the founding princes to the present, told to an audience of 'brothers'.
Part 2: Igor Sets Out: The Eclipse and the March
Part I · III–VII (Igor Starts; Invocation of Boyan; The Arrival of Vsevolod Svyatoslavic; Igor's March; The Advance of the Enemy)
Summary
Igor looks up at the sun and sees his warriors covered in darkness. He does not turn back. Telling his retinue that it is better to be cut down than taken captive, he declares that he wants to break a lance at the edge of the Polovtsian land and drink from the Don in his helmet. The poet calls again on Boyan, imagining how the old singer might have begun this song, and offers two sample openings, including the famous picture of horses neighing beyond the Sula and banners standing at Putivl.
Vsevolod, Igor's 'one brother, one bright light', arrives with his men of Kursk, warriors 'nursed amid trumpets, rocked in helmets'. Igor steps into his golden stirrup. The sun bars his way with darkness, the night groans, beasts and birds cry out, and Div, a demonic bird-spirit, calls from a tree-top to the distant lands of the steppe. The Polovtsians hurry towards the Don, their carts creaking like swans; wolves, eagles and foxes gather in expectation of the slaughter. The poet cries out that the land of Rus is already behind the frontier hill.
Analysis
The poem moves the eclipse to the very start of the expedition, before Vsevolod has even joined his brother; in the chronicle it happens on the march near the Donets. The change makes Igor's choice stark. He sees the sign and chooses glory over caution, and his boast that death is better than captivity becomes bitterly ironic, since captivity is exactly what awaits him. Students often ask whether the poem condemns Igor or admires him. The answer seems to be both: his courage is real, but the poet says plainly that his eagerness 'concealed from him the omen' (Fennell 1974).
Nature in this section is not scenery but a chorus. Animals, birds and the night itself react to the army as if they understood what the men do not. Div belongs to a pre-Christian world of spirits, and his call to the 'Unknown Land' and the 'idol of Tmutarakan' points to the far south-east, where Igor's grandfather Oleg once ruled and which the Olgovichi may have hoped to recover. The refrain 'Oh land of Russia, already art thou beyond the frontier-hill!' marks the moment the army leaves home, and it returns with a change of tense in the next section (Mann 1990).
Then Igor gazed up at the bright sun, and saw all his warriors covered with the darkness [that proceeded] out of it.
The eclipse of 1 May 1185, placed at the outset as the first and clearest omen.
Better is it to be hewn to pieces than to be captive!
Igor's heroic maxim, which the outcome of the campaign will refute.
nursed amid trumpets, rocked in helmets, fed at the spear-blades
Vsevolod's praise of his men of Kursk, a catalogue of warrior upbringing built on parallel phrases.
Oh land of Russia, already art thou beyond the frontier-hill!
The first of the poet's apostrophes to the Russian land, the poem's true protagonist.
Part 3: Victory, Defeat and the Kayala
Part I · VIII–XIII (The Battle; The Night After the Battle; The Second Day's Battle; The Exaltation of Vsevolod Svyatoslavic; The Feats of Oleg Svyatoslavic; The Third Day's Battle)
Summary
At dawn on Friday the Russians scatter the Polovtsians 'like arrows over the field', carry off their maidens, gold and silks, and pave the marshes with captured cloaks. Igor receives a banner, a standard and a silver spear. The brave 'brood of the Olgovici' sleeps on the field, far from home. Next morning bloody dawns and black clouds announce the storm: the khans Gzak and Konchak are coming, the winds blow arrows from the sea, and the Polovtsians close in from every side.
Vsevolod is praised as a 'fierce bull' who smashes enemy helmets and forgets his wounds, his city of Chernigov and his wife. The poet then turns to the past, to the 'armies of Oleg', Igor's grandfather Oleg Svyatoslavich, who 'forged rebellion' and brought civil war and Polovtsian allies into Rus in the late eleventh century. In those days, he says, ploughmen seldom called to their oxen but ravens often croaked over the dead. Then the battle resumes. After fighting through a day, a night and another day, on the third day near noon Igor's standards fall, the brothers are parted by the Kayala, and the Russians lie dead at their 'wedding-feast'.
Analysis
The structure is a classic reversal: an easy first victory and rich booty, then catastrophe. The booty is described with an almost ironic splendour, and the cloaks used to bridge the marshes suggest carelessness as well as triumph. The poet tells the battle less as a sequence of manoeuvres than as a series of images: the dawn, the storm, the thunder that 'shall rain arrows', the earth moaning and the rivers running muddy. Stribog's grandsons, the winds, fight on the Polovtsian side, so that the cosmos itself seems turned against Igor (Likhachev 1978).
The digression on Oleg is central to the poem's argument. By calling Igor's grandfather a man who 'forged rebellion', the poet links the present defeat to the inherited habit of feud, a history the Primary Chronicle records in detail (Cross 1953). Rus is called 'the scion of Dazbog', the grandchild of the sun-god, and its life was 'wasted in the factions of the princes'. The section ends with one of the most famous metaphors in early Slavic writing, battle as a wedding feast at which the Russians serve the bloody wine and drink none themselves; the metaphor of battle as feast or harvest is common in Slavic folk song (Mann 1990) (Fennell 1974).
Now the winds, the scions of Stribog, blow from the sea like arrows on to the courageous hosts of Igor.
One of the poem's pagan names: the winds are the 'grandchildren' of Stribog.
the life of [Russia] the scion of Dazbog [the Sun-god] was wasted in the factions of the princes and the generations of mankind were shortened.
The digression makes princely feuding, not the Polovtsians, the root of the land's suffering.
There they finished the feast, the brave Russians; they plied the wedding-guests with wine, but themselves were laid low defending the Russian land.
Battle as a wedding feast: the Russians are hosts who give the wine of blood and die serving it.
The grass bows down with woe and the tree bent to earth with sorrow.
Nature mourns. A similar line returns in Part III for the drowned prince Rostislav.
Part 4: The Lament of the Russian Land
Part II · I–III (Proem; Koncak's Invasion; The Consequences of Igor's Defeat)
Summary
A 'weary time' has come. Contumely, or Resentment, rises like a Maiden and splashes her swan-wings on the sea and the Don, waking hard times. The princes quarrel over trifles, each saying 'this is mine, and that is also mine', and the heathens advance from all sides. Konchak bursts into Rus 'shooting forth fire' from a flaming horn; the Russian women lament that they will never again see their husbands; Kiev and Chernigov groan, and the Polovtsians take a tribute of a squirrel's skin from every household.
The poet explains that Igor and Vsevolod have reawakened the evil that their 'father', the Grand Prince Svyatoslav of Kiev, had lulled to sleep. Svyatoslav had invaded the Polovtsian land and captured the khan Kobyak, so that foreign peoples, Germans, Venetians, Greeks and Moravians, sang his fame. Now they reproach Igor, who has sunk the wealth of Rus in the Kayala. And Igor has stepped from his golden saddle into a slave's saddle.
Analysis
The second part opens with a second proem, as if the poem were beginning again on a new theme: no longer the adventure but its consequences for the whole land. Abstract forces are given bodies. The Maiden with swan-wings is one of the poem's most mysterious figures; she has been linked both to folk images of misfortune and to the swan-maidens of Slavic folklore. The words 'this is mine, and that is also mine' sum up in a single line the political diagnosis of the whole work (Likhachev 1978).
The poet presents Svyatoslav's victory over Kobyak in 1184 as a model of what united action can do, and Igor's raid as a selfish undoing of it; historically, Igor had not taken part in the earlier campaign. The image of the golden saddle and the slave's saddle compresses the fall from prince to captive into a single contrast. This kind of antithesis, glory against shame, gold against bondage, runs through the poem (Franklin 1996).
The discord of the princes ruined them against the Pagans.
The thesis of the poem stated without ornament.
and the Pagans with victories overrode the Russian land and took tribute from each household of a squirrel's skin.
Defeat brings humiliation: furs, the currency of the forest zone, paid as tribute to the nomads.
There Igor dismounted from his golden saddle into a slave's saddle.
The fall of the prince in one antithesis.
Part 5: Svyatoslav's Dream and the Golden Word
Part II · IV–VI (The Dream of Svyatoslav Vsevolodic; The Incursion of the Polovtsy; The Lament of Svyatoslav Vsevolodic)
Summary
In Kiev the Grand Prince Svyatoslav has a troubled dream. He is dressed in a black shroud on a bed of yew, given blue wine mixed with dust, and showered with large pearls from the empty quivers of the nomads; the roof of his golden-domed hall has lost its beams, and crows croak all night. His boyars interpret: two falcons have flown from their fathers' throne, and the heathens have clipped their wings and bound Igor in iron.
The poet describes the darkness of the third day: two suns have dimmed and two young moons, Oleg and Svyatoslav, the younger princes, have been covered in darkness. The Polovtsians spread over Rus 'like a brood of pards', and Gothic maidens on the Black Sea shore sing, jingling Russian gold. Then Svyatoslav 'let fall a golden word, commingled with tears'. He reproaches his nephews for seeking glory alone and dishonourably, regrets that he no longer has the power of his brother Yaroslav's forces, and mourns that the times have gone backwards.
Analysis
The dream is built from funeral symbols that early Rus listeners would have understood: black cloth, wine of mourning, pearls that in folk belief signify tears, and a house losing its roof-beam, an omen of death in the family. The boyars' answer translates the dream into the poem's language of birds, in which princes are falcons. The double reading, first symbolic and then explained, is a technique the poem shares with folk lament and with the dream-visions of other medieval literatures (Mann 1990) (Likhachev 1978).
Svyatoslav's 'golden word' is the moral centre of the work, and scholars have debated where it ends, because the manuscript had no quotation marks and the following appeal to the princes may be his or the poet's. His charge is precise. Igor and Vsevolod tried 'to steal the glory of yore' and 'divide the glory to come' between themselves, instead of acting together under the senior prince. The speech is a statesman's view of heroism: courage without unity is worse than useless (Fennell 1974) (Nabokov 1960).
they scattered great [treasure of] pearls from the empty quivers of the nomads on to my lap
Pearls as tears; the empty quivers recall the nomads' victory.
Then the mighty Svyatoslav let fall a golden word, commingled with tears, and spake:
The 'golden word', the phrase from which the speech takes its traditional name.
Let us play a man's part; let us steal the glory of yore; let us divide the glory to come for ourselves!
Svyatoslav quotes, and condemns, the young princes' boast.
Part 6: The Appeal to the Princes
Part II · VII–IX (The Appeal to the Princes; Reproach to Yaroslav Vsevolodic and the Princes; Reminiscences)
Summary
The poet calls in turn on the most powerful princes of Rus. Vsevolod of Suzdal could splash the Volga dry with his oars; Rurik and David of Smolensk have swum in blood in golden helmets; Yaroslav Osmomysl of Galicia sits on a gold-forged throne holding back the Hungarians; Roman and Mstislav of Volhynia have made Lithuanians and Polovtsians tremble. Each is urged to step into the golden stirrup 'for the Russian land, for the wounds of Igor'. The poet recalls Izyaslav of Polotsk, who died alone fighting the Lithuanians while his brothers stayed away.
He reproaches the descendants of Vseslav of Polotsk for leading the heathens into Rus through their quarrels, then remembers Vseslav himself, an eleventh-century prince who seized the throne of Kiev, escaped from captivity, and was said to race like a wolf by night from Kiev to Tmutarakan. The battle on the Nemiga in 1067 is pictured as a threshing floor where heads are sheaves and souls are winnowed from bodies. The section ends with a lament for the days of the first princes and the old Vladimir, whose banners are now divided.
Analysis
This is the most explicitly political part of the poem and its longest section. The list of princes is a map of Rus around 1185, from the north-east to the south-west, and the praise of each prince's power doubles as a reproach: if they are so strong, why do they not act? The repeated formula 'for the Russian land, for the wounds of Igor' makes one prince's injury a wound of the whole land. The appeal assumes a common Rus identity above local loyalties, which is why it became important to later Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian national movements (Franklin 1996) (Fennell 1974).
Vseslav is the most fantastic figure in the poem: a prince who shape-shifts into a wolf, wraps himself in blue mist and hears in Kiev the bells of Polotsk. The poet attributes to Boyan a proverb about him, that no one can escape God's judgment, which ties pagan marvels to a Christian moral. The threshing image of the Nemiga is a fine example of the poem's agricultural metaphors for war, which it shares with oral epic traditions across the Slavic world (Jakobson 1966) (Mann 1990).
Step, my lords, into your golden stirrups, for the insult to our time, for the Russian land, the wounds of Igor, the brave son of Svyatoslav.
The refrain of the appeal, here to Rurik and David.
On the Nemiga the sheaves are laid out with heads; men thresh with flails in hedgerows; on the barn-floor they spread out life; they winnow the soul from the body.
War as harvest: the battle of 1067 between Vseslav and the sons of Yaroslav.
Neither the crafty man nor the experienced, nor a bird nor a minstrel can escape God's judgments.
Boyan's refrain on Vseslav: magic and cunning give no protection from divine judgment.
Part 7: Yaroslavna's Lament
Part II · X (The Lament of Yaroslavna)
Summary
Igor's wife Yaroslavna, daughter of Yaroslav of Galicia, laments on the rampart of Putivl at dawn. She will fly like a cuckoo along the Danube, wet her beaver-fur sleeve in the Kayala and wipe the bloody wounds from her husband's body. She then speaks three times to the powers of nature.
She asks the Wind why it blew enemy arrows on her husband's men and scattered her joy over the feather-grass. She asks the Dnieper, which once carried Svyatoslav's boats against Kobyak, to carry her husband back to her. And she asks the bright Sun, warm and lovely to all, why it parched Igor's warriors with thirst in the waterless steppe and tightened their bows.
Analysis
Yaroslavna's lament is the most celebrated passage of the poem and one of the finest laments in medieval literature. It draws on the forms of the Slavic women's lament (plach), with its repeated openings, its direct address to the elements and its cuckoo, the bird of widows and sorrow. The repetition 'Yaroslavna wails early at Putivl' on the rampart' gives it the shape of an incantation, and Magnus's headings call each part an 'Incantation'. Many readers hear a magical function in it, as if her words help to bring about the escape that follows at once (Mann 1990) (Likhachev 1978).
The lament changes the poem's perspective. After the princes' boasts and the statesman's rebuke, a woman's voice speaks for private grief, and the cosmic forces that fought against Igor are now addressed as 'Master' and asked to turn. The Wind, the River and the Sun correspond to the elements that harmed the army in the battle scenes. Wind, water and sun are also the order of her petitions, ending with the highest power, and the next section opens with God showing Igor the road home (Fennell 1974).
I will wet my beaver sleeves in the Kayala river, I will wipe away for the prince his bloody wounds on his stricken body.
The wife's wish to fly to the battlefield and tend her husband.
Oh Wind, little Wind, wherefore, Master, blowest thou with violence?
The first incantation: nature addressed as a lord who can be questioned and persuaded.
Oh sun, thou bright, thrice bright one! To all men art thou warm and beauteous!
The final petition, to the sun that darkened at the start of the campaign.
Part 8: Igor's Escape and Return
Part III · I–V (Igor's Escape; II; III; Reminiscence of Boyan; Igor's Return to Russia)
Summary
At midnight the sea surges and God shows Igor the way home. Igor lies awake measuring in his mind the plains from the Don to the Donets. Ovlur whistles across the river; Igor rushes like an ermine to the reeds, like a white duck to the water, leaps on his horse, runs like a wolf and flies like a falcon, hunting geese and swans for his meals. The river Donets greets him, and Igor thanks it for sheltering him with mist and birds, recalling by contrast the river Stugna that drowned the young prince Rostislav in 1093.
The birds fall silent as Gzak and Konchak ride in pursuit. They debate what to do with the falcon's fledgling, Igor's son Vladimir, who remains behind: Gzak would shoot him, Konchak would bind him with a beautiful maiden, and Gzak warns that then they would lose both. The poet quotes Boyan once more on how hard it is for a head without a body, and for the Russian land without Igor. Then the sun shines, Igor is in Rus, maidens sing on the Danube, and Igor rides up to the church of the Holy Mother of God of Pirogoshcha in Kiev. The poem ends with glory to the princes and their retinue, 'fighting for the Christians against the Pagans'.
Analysis
The escape is told as a sequence of transformations like those of Boyan at the start and Vseslav in the reminiscences: Igor becomes ermine, duck, wolf and falcon. The magical style suits the folk-tale shape of the ending, in which the hero escapes with a helper and nature itself protects him. Historically, the chronicle gives Ovlur (Lavr) a more ordinary role as a Polovtsian who arranged the flight; the khans' dialogue about the 'maiden fair' alludes to the marriage of Vladimir Igorevich to Konchak's daughter (Zenkovsky 1974) (Franklin 1996).
The ending is joyful, even triumphant, though Igor's campaign has achieved nothing and his army is dead. The light of the sun returns, reversing the opening eclipse, and the song moves from the steppe to Kiev, from pagan nature to a Christian church. The final glory to the princes 'fighting for the Christians against the Pagans' reframes the whole story as a struggle of Christian Rus against the steppe. Some scholars find the ending ironic, others see it as a genuine celebration that makes the return itself a sign of hope for unity (Fennell 1974) (Likhachev 1978).
Igor sleeps, Igor wakes, Igor in his mind measures the plains from the mighty Don to the little Donets.
Threefold repetition of the hero's name before the flight.
If the hawk is flying to his nest we will fetter the fledgeling with a maiden fair.
Konchak's proposal, alluding to the marriage of Igor's son to the khan's daughter.
The sun shines in the heavens. Igor the prince is in the Russian land.
The returning light answers the eclipse of the opening.
Characters
Igor and the Olgovichi
- Igor Svyatoslavich
- Prince of Novgorod-Seversk (1151–1202), grandson of Oleg Svyatoslavich. He leads the raid of 1185 against the Polovtsians, ignores the omen of the eclipse, is defeated and captured on the Kayala and escapes after some months in captivity. The poem shows him as brave, ambitious and rash; he is both the hero of the tale and the example of what the poet warns against. He later became prince of Chernigov.
- Vsevolod Svyatoslavich
- Igor's younger brother, prince of Trubchevsk and Kursk, called the 'fierce bull'. He brings the experienced warriors of Kursk and fights with terrible energy in the battle, forgetting wounds, honour and home. He too is captured.
- Vladimir Igorevich
- Igor's son, prince of Putivl, a teenager at the time of the campaign. He remains in captivity after his father's escape; the khans' talk of binding the 'fledgeling' with a maiden alludes to his marriage to Konchak's daughter. He is greeted in the closing song of glory.
- Yaroslavna
- Igor's wife, daughter of Yaroslav Osmomysl of Galicia; the chronicle gives her name as Efrosinia. Her lament on the walls of Putivl, addressed to the Wind, the Dnieper and the Sun, is the emotional climax of the poem.
- Svyatoslav Olgovich of Rylsk and Oleg
- Igor's nephew Svyatoslav, prince of Rylsk, took part in the campaign; with Oleg, usually taken to be Igor's young son, he is one of the 'two young Moons' covered in darkness.
- Oleg Svyatoslavich
- Igor's grandfather (died 1115), founder of the Olgovichi of Chernigov and once prince of Tmutarakan. He fought his kinsmen for decades, sometimes with Polovtsian allies. The poem's digression makes him the type of the prince who 'forged rebellion with his sword'.
Other princes
- Svyatoslav Vsevolodovich
- Grand Prince of Kiev, Igor's cousin, whom the poem calls 'father' and who calls Igor and Vsevolod his nephews. He had defeated the Polovtsians and captured the khan Kobyak in 1184. His ominous dream and his 'golden word' of reproach form the moral centre of the poem.
- The princes of the appeal
- Vsevolod 'Big Nest' of Suzdal, Rurik and David Rostislavich, Yaroslav Osmomysl of Galicia, Roman and Mstislav of Volhynia, and others. The poet praises the power of each and summons them all to avenge 'the wounds of Igor' for the sake of the Russian land.
- Vseslav of Polotsk
- An eleventh-century prince (died 1101) who briefly seized the throne of Kiev in 1068. Legends made him a sorcerer and werewolf; the poem shows him racing by night as a wolf and hearing the bells of Polotsk in Kiev, a figure of brilliant but restless power.
Polovtsians
- Konchak
- Khan of the Polovtsians, the most powerful steppe leader of his day and an old adversary of the Rus princes. He leads the forces that defeat Igor, raids Rus afterwards and in the pursuit proposes binding Igor's son with a bride rather than killing him.
- Gzak
- A Polovtsian khan (Gza in the chronicle) who joins Konchak against Igor. He 'races like a grey wolf' to the battle and in the pursuit argues that the fledgling should be shot.
- Ovlur
- A Polovtsian (Lavr in the chronicle) who helps Igor escape, whistling to him across the river and fleeing with him. The poem names him also as Vlur.
- Kobyak
- A khan captured by Svyatoslav of Kiev in 1184 and brought to Kiev, cited as an example of the victories that unity can win.
Powers of nature and others
- Boyan
- A bard of the eleventh century, otherwise unknown, called 'nightingale of the times agone' and 'scion of Veles'. The poet both admires his art and distances himself from it, and quotes him at key moments. He is the only named secular poet of early Rus.
- Div
- A demonic spirit, perhaps a bird, that cries from a tree-top as Igor sets out and later 'casts himself down' on the earth at the defeat. His nature is disputed: a pagan deity, a bird of omen or a figure from Eastern lore.
- Stribog, Dazhbog, Veles and Khors
- Gods of the East Slavic pantheon, named in kinship formulas: the winds are Stribog's grandchildren, the Russians Dazhbog's, Boyan Veles's; Vseslav crosses the path of 'great Khors'. Their presence in a Christian poem is a central problem of interpretation.
- Troyan
- A mysterious name in the phrases 'path of Troyan', 'ages of Troyan' and 'land of Troyan'. Scholars have connected it with the Roman emperor Trajan, with a pagan god, or with a lost Slavic tradition.
- The Russian land
- Not a person but the poem's most often addressed figure, apostrophised as it disappears behind the frontier hill and lamented when it suffers. The unity and welfare of 'the Russian land' give the story its meaning.
Themes
Unity and discord among the princes
The poem's central argument is that the misfortunes of Rus come from the quarrels of its rulers. The digressions on Oleg and Vseslav, the image of brothers saying 'this is mine, and that is also mine', Svyatoslav's rebuke and the appeal to the princes all make the same point. Igor's defeat is shown not as an isolated accident but as the fruit of a long habit of separate, selfish action.
This message does not ask for a single monarch. It appeals to the princes as a family with common duties to the land, under the senior authority of Kiev. Historians have pointed out that the poem's political ideal is that of its own time, the brotherhood of princes, and that later readers, from Karamzin to Soviet scholars, read into it the case for a centralised state (Franklin 1996) (Likhachev 1978).
Glory, honour and rashness
Igor's men ride out 'seeking for themselves honour, for their prince renown', and the poem never denies the beauty of that aim. Vsevolod's frenzy in battle is praised with real admiration. Yet the poem also measures glory against its cost. Svyatoslav's 'golden word' accuses the brothers of trying to take the glory of the past and future for themselves, and the lament of the women and of the land shows who pays for it.
The tension between heroic admiration and political judgment is what gives the poem its depth. Igor ends as a hero who returns in triumph, but the reader has seen his army die and the land plundered because of his choice.
Nature as a living participant
Nature in the Lay feels and acts. The sun darkens, the night groans, animals give warnings, the winds fight, the grass bows in sorrow, the Donets shelters the fugitive and the woodpeckers show him the road. Yaroslavna addresses the Wind, the River and the Sun as masters. The boundary between the human and natural world is thin, and princes are constantly described as falcons, wolves, bulls and suns.
Scholars have linked this to the poetics of oral folk song, where nature images often run parallel to human events, and to a world-view in which natural signs are messages. The effect is to make the defeat of a single army a disturbance in the whole order of things (Mann 1990) (Likhachev 1978).
Memory and the 'two halves of time'
The poet wants to join the glories of the past with the troubles of the present. He recalls Boyan, Yaroslav the Wise, Oleg, Vseslav, the first Vladimir and the drowned Rostislav, and he measures the present against them. The past offers both models and warnings: great princes who held the land together and rebels whose feuds began the ruin. The poem's own song is offered as a new link in that chain, 'and hereafter the young shall sing it'.
Lament and the voice of women
The poem contains many laments: the land's, the Russian women's, Svyatoslav's, Rostislav's mother's and above all Yaroslavna's. Women's voices speak for those who stay at home and bear the cost of war, and their grief is given almost magical power. Yaroslavna's lament is followed directly by Igor's escape, as if her words had moved the elements in his favour (Mann 1990).
Motifs
Darkness and light
The eclipse opens the campaign, 'two suns' and 'two young moons' are darkened at the defeat, Igor's sun has dimmed in the appeal, and Yaroslavna questions the 'thrice bright' sun. The final section opens with the sun shining in the heavens, so that the return of light marks the return of the prince.
Birds of prey and their victims
Princes are falcons and hawks; the enemy and the carrion birds are crows, ravens and eagles; Boyan's songs are falcons striking swans. The khans' final dialogue speaks of the hawk and its fledgling. The bird code lets the poem move freely between literal and figurative action.
Gold
Golden stirrups, helmets, saddles, thrones and words mark princely dignity. The image of Igor moving from a golden saddle into a slave's saddle, and the Gothic maidens 'tinkling in Russian gold', show glory turned into loss.
Refrains and repetition
Phrases return with variations: 'beyond the frontier-hill', 'for the Russian land, for the wounds of Igor', 'Yaroslavna wails early at Putivl''. These refrains give the work its song-like rhythm and its structure, and they are a main argument for reading it as poetry rather than prose (Jakobson 1966).
War as feast and harvest
Battle is a wedding feast where blood is the wine, a sowing of bones that grows into grief, and on the Nemiga a threshing floor where souls are winnowed from bodies. The metaphors come from common life and from the traditional imagery of Slavic song.
Symbols
The eclipse
The darkened sun is the poem's chief omen, a sign from the cosmos that Igor sees and ignores. Placing it at the start makes the whole campaign a story of warning disregarded.
The Don and the helmet
Igor's wish to 'drink of the Don in my helmet' stands for conquest of the steppe and the recovery of lost southern lands. It returns in Svyatoslav's dream and in the boyars' speech as the image of the brothers' ambition.
Boyan's strings
The strings that sound by themselves under the singer's fingers stand for poetry as an almost magical power to preserve the glory of princes, the power the Lay claims for itself.
The Maiden with swan-wings
Resentment, or the wrong done to the land, takes the form of a swan-winged maiden who wakes the 'heavy times'. She embodies the misfortune that the princes' discord has set loose.
The rampart of Putivl
The wall on which Yaroslavna laments is the boundary between the home and the steppe, the place from which the waiting wife looks out towards the absent prince.
Critical debates
Authenticity: medieval poem or modern forgery?
Because the manuscript burned in 1812 and the text has no close medieval parallel, doubts arose almost at once. The strongest case for forgery was made by André Mazon in 1940, who argued that the poem was a late eighteenth-century work modelled on the Zadonshchina and on the taste for Ossian. In 1948 Roman Jakobson and his collaborators answered with a detailed defence, a new edition and English translations, La Geste du Prince Igor' (Mazon 1940) (Grégoire 1948) (Jakobson 1966).
In the early 1960s Aleksandr Zimin argued that the work was composed by the archimandrite Ioil Bykovsky in the eighteenth century; his study circulated in a tiny duplicated edition, was debated at a meeting of Soviet historians in 1964 and printed in full only in 2006. Edward Keenan later proposed the Czech scholar Josef Dobrovský as author. The most influential answer came from the linguist Andrei Zaliznyak, who showed in 2004 that the text follows fine rules of Old Russian grammar, such as the order of enclitic particles and the use of dual forms, which were discovered only from birchbark letters and other sources unknown in the 1790s. Most specialists consider the question settled in favour of authenticity, though Keenan's book and others keep it open (Zimin 2006) (Keenan 2003) (Zaliznyak 2004).
The Zadonshchina: model or imitation?
The Zadonshchina, a work of the late fourteenth or fifteenth century about Dmitry Donskoy's victory over the Tatars at Kulikovo in 1380, repeats many phrases of the Lay, including the opening address to 'brothers', the appeal to Boyan and many images. The traditional view is that its author used the Lay as a model, reversing defeat into victory. Mazon and Zimin argued the opposite: that the Lay was composed from the Zadonshchina. Comparative studies of the two texts, and Zaliznyak's analysis of which readings are linguistically older, support the priority of the Lay (Mazon 1940) (Zaliznyak 2004) (Fennell 1974).
The argument matters for more than dating. If the Zadonshchina imitated the Lay, then the Lay was known and copied in Muscovy, and it belonged to a living literary tradition rather than standing alone (Zenkovsky 1974).
Genre: song, oration or epic?
The title calls the work a slovo, 'word' or 'discourse', a term used for sermons and orations; it also calls itself a povest', a tale, and a pesn', a song. Dmitry Likhachev saw it as a political oration in a form close to oral song, addressed to an audience of princes and their men. Others have treated it as a heroic epic comparable to the Song of Roland or the Nibelungenlied, while Robert Mann has argued that it reworks a lost oral epic about Igor that also lies behind the chronicle accounts (Likhachev 1978) (Mann 1990) (Mann 2005).
The question of form is linked to genre. The manuscript was written without line divisions, and Magnus printed it as prose. Jakobson, Nabokov and many editors have arranged it in lines of irregular length, guided by the rhythm of its parallel phrases, and Boris Gasparov analysed its patterns of sound and repetition in detail. Whether to call it rhythmic prose or free verse is partly a matter of definition: it has no fixed metre, but its repetitions give it a strong rhythmic shape (Magnus 1915) (Nabokov 1960) (Gasparov 1984).
Paganism and Christianity
The poem was written two centuries after the conversion of Rus, and it ends with a church and a cry for 'the Christians against the Pagans'. Yet it names Stribog, Dazhbog, Veles and Khors, gives voice to Div and treats nature as a set of living powers. Some scholars have taken this as evidence of a surviving 'double faith' in which pagan beliefs lived alongside Christianity; others see the gods as poetic ornament, comparable to classical deities in Christian Latin poetry, or as signs of an archaic style the poet deliberately cultivated (Likhachev 1978) (Franklin 2002).
The Christian elements are few but placed at key points: God shows Igor the road, Boyan's proverb speaks of God's judgment and the hero ends at a church. The mixture itself may be the point: the old names give the poem a sense of antiquity and of the land's long memory, while its moral frame is Christian (Fennell 1974).
The political message
There is wide agreement that the poem calls for unity among the princes against the steppe, but less agreement about what that meant. Soviet scholarship, following Likhachev, often presented it as a call for the unity of the Russian people in the face of division and foreign threat. Historians of Rus have stressed that the poet appeals to a family of princes, not to a nation, and that the Polovtsians were also trading partners, allies and in-laws of the princes, as the marriage of Igor's son shows (Likhachev 1978) (Franklin 1996).
The choice of princes addressed also raises questions. Some see the list as a balanced panorama of the land; others detect partisanship, for example in the praise of Svyatoslav of Kiev or of the Galician Yaroslav, Yaroslavna's father, which has been used to locate the poet's court (Fennell 1974).
Who was the author?
The author is anonymous, and many candidates have been proposed: a warrior of Igor's own retinue, a court singer at Kiev, a Chernigov boyar, a member of the Galician court, and even Igor himself. The poem's detailed knowledge of the campaign, of princely genealogy and of the Polovtsian world suggests someone close to the princely courts, and its familiarity with Boyan suggests a trained singer or a learned man interested in oral tradition. None of the attributions has won general acceptance (Likhachev 1978) (Fennell 1974).
Reception in national culture
From its first publication the Lay was read as proof that Rus had a heroic literature comparable to the West's. It became a school text and a national symbol, translated into modern Russian by Zhukovsky and many others, and claimed also by Ukrainian and Belarusian writers as part of their heritage. Its most famous afterlife is Aleksandr Borodin's opera Prince Igor, left unfinished at his death in 1887, completed by Rimsky-Korsakov and Glazunov and first performed in St Petersburg in 1890; the Polovtsian Dances became famous in the West through Diaghilev's Ballets Russes in 1909. Richard Taruskin has examined the opera's picture of the steppe as a case of Russian musical orientalism (Taruskin 1997) (Likhachev 1981).
In English the poem reached a wider audience through Nabokov's translation of 1960, with its long commentary, and through anthologies such as Zenkovsky's. The authenticity controversy itself became part of the work's history, because a challenge to the Lay was felt in Russia as a challenge to the antiquity of the national literature (Nabokov 1960) (Zenkovsky 1974) (Keenan 2003).
Key passages
laid his own wizard fingers on the living strings, which then themselves throbbed out praise for the princes.
The poem's image of the bard's art: the falcons released on swans turn out to be fingers on strings, and the strings themselves seem to sing. It shows the poet's interest in his own craft and in the tradition of court song he inherits.
Then Igor gazed up at the bright sun, and saw all his warriors covered with the darkness [that proceeded] out of it.
The eclipse of 1 May 1185, moved to the start of the campaign. Igor's choice to ride on despite the sign shapes the whole story as a warning ignored.
I wish to lay down my head and to drink of the Don in my helmet!
Igor's heroic resolve to reach the Don, the boundary of the steppe. The wish to drink from the river in a helmet stands for conquest, and the readiness to die is sincere; the irony is that he will live, but as a captive.
That Oleg with his sword forged rebellion, and sowed arrows over the earth.
The digression on Igor's grandfather. By tracing the present disaster back to the feuds of Oleg, the poet turns a story of one raid into a history of princely discord.
There of bloody wine there was not enough. There they finished the feast, the brave Russians; they plied the wedding-guests with wine, but themselves were laid low defending the Russian land.
The climax of the battle in the metaphor of a wedding feast. The Russians are hosts who give the enemy the wine of their blood; the image combines horror with a kind of grim festivity common in Slavic song.
"This is mine, and that is also mine."
One line sums up the poem's diagnosis of the ills of Rus: princes quarrelling over possessions while the heathens advance from all sides.
But, dishonourably have ye conquered, for dishonourably have ye shed the blood of the heathen.
From the 'golden word'. The senior prince condemns his kinsmen's victory itself as dishonourable, because it was won for their own glory and not in common cause.
Step, my lords, into your golden stirrups, for the insult to our time, for the Russian land, the wounds of Igor, the brave son of Svyatoslav.
The refrain of the appeal to the princes. Igor's wounds become the wounds of the whole land, and the princes are called to act together.
Oh Dnepr Slovutic, thou hast pierced the stone mountains through the land of the Polovtsy.
The second of her incantations. She praises the river's power before asking it to carry her husband home, in the manner of a prayer that recalls past favours before making a request.
Glory to the Princes and (praise) to the druzina! AMEN.
The closing doxology. After defeat and lament the poem ends in praise and a Christian 'Amen', placing Igor's return within a song of celebration for princes and their retinue.
Questions for study
Why does the poet begin by discussing Boyan? Does he admire him, reject him, or both?
Consider the opening question, the images of flight and the falcons, the later quotations from Boyan, and the idea of joining 'both halves of this time'.
How does the poem use the eclipse, and why might it place the eclipse earlier than the chronicle does?
Compare the sun at the beginning, the 'two suns' at the defeat, Yaroslavna's address to the sun and the shining sun of the last section.
Is Igor a hero or a warning in this poem?
Weigh his speeches, the narrator's comment on the omen, Svyatoslav's 'golden word' and the joyful ending.
What is the function of the digressions on Oleg and Vseslav?
Think about how the past explains the present, and about the images of feud, sorcery and divided banners.
How does the poem make nature take part in the action?
Look at the animals on the march, the winds of Stribog, the grass and trees that bow, Yaroslavna's incantations and the Donets.
Why might Yaroslavna's lament come exactly where it does, just before Igor's escape?
Consider the folk lament, the idea of incantation and the order Wind, River, Sun, followed by 'God manifests the road'.
What does the phrase 'the Russian land' mean in the poem, and how have later readers interpreted it?
Compare its uses as an apostrophe, in the appeal to the princes and in modern national readings; think about the difference between a family of princes and a nation.
How do pagan gods and Christian elements coexist in the Lay?
List the gods named and where they appear, then look at God's role in the escape and at the ending in Kiev.
What are the strongest arguments for and against the authenticity of the poem?
Think about the lost manuscript, the relation to the Zadonshchina, Ossianic taste, and the linguistic evidence presented by Zaliznyak.
Should the Lay be read as prose or as poetry? What difference does Magnus's prose layout make?
Look at its refrains, parallel phrases and repetitions, and compare a passage laid out in lines in another translation.
Further reading
- Cross, Samuel Hazzard, and Olgerd P. Sherbowitz-Wetzor, trans. and eds. The Russian Primary Chronicle: Laurentian Text. Cambridge, MA: Mediaeval Academy of America, 1953.
- Fennell, John, and Antony Stokes. Early Russian Literature. London: Faber and Faber, 1974.
- Franklin, Simon. Writing, Society and Culture in Early Rus, c. 950–1300. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
- Franklin, Simon, and Jonathan Shepard. The Emergence of Rus, 750–1200. London: Longman, 1996.
- Gasparov, Boris. Poetika "Slova o polku Igoreve". Vienna: Wiener Slawistischer Almanach, 1984.
- Grégoire, Henri, Roman Jakobson and Marc Szeftel, eds. La Geste du Prince Igor': Épopée russe du douzième siècle. Annuaire de l'Institut de Philologie et d'Histoire Orientales et Slaves 8 (1945–1947). New York, 1948.
- Jakobson, Roman. Selected Writings, vol. 4: Slavic Epic Studies. The Hague: Mouton, 1966.
- Keenan, Edward L. Josef Dobrovský and the Origins of the Igor' Tale. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, 2003.
- Likhachev, D. S. "Slovo o polku Igoreve" i kul'tura ego vremeni. Leningrad: Khudozhestvennaya literatura, 1978.
- Likhachev, Dmitry. The Great Heritage: The Classical Literature of Old Rus. Moscow: Progress, 1981.
- Magnus, Leonard A., ed. and trans. The Tale of the Armament of Igor, A.D. 1185: A Russian Historical Epic. London: Oxford University Press, 1915.
- Mann, Robert. Lances Sing: A Study of the Igor Tale. Columbus, OH: Slavica, 1990.
- Mann, Robert. The Igor Tales and Their Folkloric Background. Jupiter, FL: Birchbark Press of Karacharovo, 2005.
- Mazon, André. Le Slovo d'Igor. Paris: Droz, 1940.
- Nabokov, Vladimir, trans. The Song of Igor's Campaign: An Epic of the Twelfth Century. New York: Vintage Books, 1960.
- Obolensky, Dimitri. The Byzantine Commonwealth: Eastern Europe, 500–1453. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1971.
- Taruskin, Richard. Defining Russia Musically: Historical and Hermeneutical Essays. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997.
- Vernadsky, George. Kievan Russia. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1948.
- Zaliznyak, A. A. "Slovo o polku Igoreve": vzglyad lingvista. Moscow: Yazyki slavyanskoi kul'tury, 2004.
- Zenkovsky, Serge A., ed. and trans. Medieval Russia's Epics, Chronicles, and Tales. Rev. ed. New York: Dutton, 1974.
- Zimin, A. A. Slovo o polku Igoreve. St Petersburg: Dmitrii Bulanin, 2006.
Written by the Poetry Codex editors. Updated 2026-10-19.